


Vengess Victorious

by Calesvol



Series: The Archives [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Consensual, F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:27:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calesvol/pseuds/Calesvol
Summary: Based on Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless, Lunafreya was once the Tsarevna of Light, set to ascend to her mother's place as Oracle, diviner between the Tsars and Tsaristas of creation itself. However, her mother's death brought destitution with it, and Lunafreya must battle between keeping the world being thrown into chaos and a heart tugged in too many directions, between being a girl and a queen.





	Vengess Victorious

Warnings: M, some abuse

* * *

They didn’t like it when she dreamed. They knew what flitted across her face when she did, of those gold dresses and ivory sandals and humming summer breezes of home. She was peaceful, and light, this former princess. Even clad in ragged dog’s cloth, a girl who sat by the hearth and waited for scraps, she remembered what she was—who she was. A princess pushed from her nest, daughter of the Tsarina of Light. But, she was no Tsarevna to them.

 

She was lost, she was human, as insignificant as coal dust scattered near a stove. As it coated her, sooty and ashen on her features once lunar as silk, hair spun from pouring, pale gold.

 

On a bed of straw, Lunafreya curled into herself like a hound, still dreaming in vales of sylleblossoms and a dead mother’s love. The stove behind her crackled and cinders collapsed, a breath of flame exhaling through the metal flume that fed into the chimney. Warmth caressed her back and made her glow, yet despite how tightly she curled her toes and fingers, it was not enough to keep warm.

 

Thunderous staccato resonated from the train below in the valley cloven by tracks, motes of smog and coal smoke pillaging through a gray dawn and polluting the air with acerbity and bitterness. Luna coughed as azure eyes cracked open like eggs, sudden and stiff. It was early morning, unfurling her limbs that creaked from the cold, sooty soles accented by blue toes. Always cold, no matter what.

 

“Luna! Come here this instant!” Luna jolted when she was suddenly summoned by her mistress, a cold flush suffusing as she hurried in a panic, almost fumbling through the straw with a coltish beginning. She tapped down her hair and tightened her ponytail, slapping her mottled dress of powdery dust and sliding into her slippers as she ran through the kitchen like a fox in a hen house before composing herself again.

 

“At once, Lady Ulldor!” she called through the rafters, hoping her voice would carry as she hurriedly put water to boil in a tea kettle, fumbling with matches and their antiquated stove. The old kitchenette whirred to life as fire flamed its veins, Luna’s brows furrowing as she ensured all was ready for preparation.

 

“Lunafreya!”

 

Luna bolted like a crop had been taken to her heels, whipping her strides and forcing her into a near run that shamed her heritage. She paused before the threshold of Lady Ulldor’s room, ringed by statues and paintings so congested by their own layers they seemed to sweat color from the loud garishness of this place, of this red-cocooned corridor. She opened the heavy carved door, mindful to curtsy and to keep her eyes trained low.

 

Lady Ulldor was a woman bathed in wealth, sunk into a satin cushion like a dowager queen shrewdly overlooking her empire. Her gaunt, handsome face was framed by heavy graying ringlets and she was painted more heavily than the subjects of the portraits that hung from the walls. White as the bones that nearly split from her joints, she wore her power in rings and ornamental gold, flippant and rich compared to the ragged girl who slept in straw.

 

“My tea?” she demanded loftily, arching an inked brow as she blew smoke rings impatiently into the foggy air. Marina Ulldor always was this way, after all. Her cutting eyes of pale gray lingered on her face like smoke, Luna’s eyes lowering away.

 

“My apologies, Lady Ulldor. I’ll be but a moment more with it,” Luna apologized in a stiff bow, only for Marina to lower herself from her dais and bring her spindly gait towards Lunafreya. Spidery fingers curled around her jaw and the cigarette holder was held loosely in her other hand, twining about the instrument like thread.

 

“I’ll never under the emperor’s or my husband’s fascination with you, _Tsarevna of Light_ ,” Marina hissed through sharpened teeth mockingly. Up close, her painted face was craggy with age, Luna flitting among its hills and wrinkled valleys before those severe, stormy eyes demanded hers again. Her nails bit crescents and welts into Luna’s skin, the young woman shifting uncomfortably. “You’re just a dirty girl without a title or gil to her name. You’re nothing but an insect I could crush beneath my heel.”

 

“Lady Ulldor?” A waxy, tired voice broke through their confrontation. Luna nearly collapsed to her knees when Marina threw her away, puffing irately on her cigarette while Maria stood pensively in the doorway, a silent gesture to retreat. “Your tea is ready. Shall I bring it in?” She was old, gray hair bound in an oiled bun. As Ulldor’s servants were required.

 

Marina champed on the cigarette holder impatiently while Luna gathered herself quietly and exited the room, a sharp sting of tears pooled within her eyes that she refused to allow the woman to see. For though her pride was a shattered bird in a cage, forgotten how to sing, it still fluttered. Sometimes. Luna wiped those tears before they could truly be shed, the dusky dark of the corridor encompassing both women comfortably.

 

“Are you well, Lady Lunafreya? Come, to the kitchen. I think I know just the thing to remedy this.”

 

Guilt flowered cold and dreadfully in her breast, feeling as though she were robbing Maria of duties that often saw them severely punished for not being completed on time. Still, she followed with all the beguilement of a duckling back into the stone-cold kitchen, where the stove-fires crackled when fed the scraps that kept them blazing bright. “Maria, please—don’t call me that. Please tend to Lady Ulldor first and foremost,” the young woman protested of Maria’s fussiness, the older one busily lifting the puffing and singing kettle from the stove top to pour into two waiting mugs with tea leaves settled inside.

 

Nonplussed, Maria poured a cup for Luna first and foremost, stirring the contents to brew before doing the same with Marina’s with many more flavorful embellishments for the Commander’s wife’s sake. For all the richness that dominated the domicile, any place inhabited by the servants was woeful and dreadfully cold. “Nonsense, Luna. I’ll be just a moment, dear.”

 

Luna took the old, earthenware mug in hand, quietly relieved that Maria had enough sense not to relegate use of the gleaming porcelain mugs so thinly crafted they might be crystallized lace, for a mere servant as it often spelled trouble. She was grateful for the warmth, though knew it would end soon enough when she and Maria had to set about preparing the Ulldors’ breakfast, no easy feat when their teenaged daughters were thrown into the mix.

 

Luna sipped her tea quickly, deciding incisively that she would begin preparations for breakfast for the five of them. And it was no easy task, surely. The sole manservant, Jared, was tending to Caligo himself while the youngest of them, Talcott, was likely polishing their shoes for the day. That left she and Maria to tend to Marina and her daughters. For Caligo, it was simple; as austere as Niflheim’s armies prided itself upon being, _kolbasa_ , ham, sandwiches were often served and paired with _symiki_ , a sort of pancake. Solheimian-style coffee was popular, served dark or with lemon. For Marina and her daughters, they always basked in decadence. _Semolina_ served hot and drizzled with syrups and blueberries, raspberries and blueberries with puffy cream paired on their _symiki_ , and coffee so creamy it was too sweet for those reared on an ordinary palette.

 

When Maria had returned, Lunafreya had already begun whipping the cream in a metal bowl, though dull thumping upon the tin roof drew their attention with furrowed brows. The griddle upon which the pancakes flattened spat and hissed greasily, but it wasn’t enough to draw their eye. In utter disbelief did Luna abandon her work and dash to the window, recoiling by what she saw.

 

Feathery shapes fell from the sky, a small panic bursting through her chest when Luna realized these were birds that thumped upon the roof, in the immense cluster of buildings terraced into the cliff-side did they fall, morbid and grim and ominous.

 

Reactive, Luna grabbed the tattered curtains and drew them shut, the intercom system blaring just as she did. “Maria! Luna! Close the curtains in my and my daughters’ rooms this instant!” Marina hollered, causing both women to wince. Neither exchanged more than worried glances before rushing from the kitchen like hens fleeing a coop, splitting in the corridors as frightened shrieks of the daughters sounded above the cacophony.

 

Within Marina’s room, Luna rushed to close the curtains while the woman herself hurled abuses upon her, doing so with grit teeth and wishing the swish and furl of falling blinds and layered satin could drown it out. “You useless cunt!” she shrieked, chucking a slipper that bounced off Luna’s back, the younger woman flinching. “You useless whore! Harlot, wench!”

 

It was only when she finished that the ruddy hole of her mouth seemed to close that Marina threw herself on her silk sheets, robe pooling at the nude, bloated contours of her grotesque body beneath. Strange, when compared to the arachnid thinness the rest of her bore. Lunafreya swiped errant bangs from her eyes like leaves left wild by a storm. “You’re trying to sabotage me, aren’t you?! Tormenting me, even though my husband gave you a home!” Marina caterwauled, eyeliner running down her face like rain, like black blood. “You only wish to ruin me!”

 

Luna speechlessly attempted to comfort the distraught woman, unknowing of what to say. “I— Please, my apologies. I didn’t mean to be so slow, my lady—“ Marina only hissed when she drew near, lashing out with nails like talons.

 

“Leave me be! Prepare breakfast, but leave me!” she raged, coif tangling into a nest of bedraggled gray hair, Luna withdrawing a step before fleeing the room. Like an eaglet shrieking for its mother, barely a wind touching the nest. Luna feared her, but a part of her deep inside wished to stand tall and say, _I am the daughter of the Tsari_ _na_ _of Li_ _ght_ _and you are a little, cowardly woman compared to me_. Stand defiant and iron. She did not quake, but skin flinched when whipped no matter how strong its wearer was.

 

Within the hall, it was Jared she nearly ran into, the blonde balking short of upsetting the man’s cane from his hand. “Ah, please excuse me, Luna.” His smile was pleasant, but a sense of urgency riddled it. “Master Caligo wished to see you. I’ll tend to breakfast in your stead.”

 

“I—thank you, Jared.” She breathed a strange relief, watching as the man nodded pleasantly and doddered away.

 

She knew where Jared meant. Caligo only ever spoke in confidence within his study, a place all of the staff knew of. High-walled with lacquered roan panels and wallpaper red as blood, square and sturdy, deep and mired in thought and books thickly as cigar smoke. The vaulted ceilings bowed like scholars bent over their work, mosaics their minds of imagination wandering away from them. The deliciously musky scent of old books drowned that of acrid cigar smoke, fumigating from the tip Caligo puffed from behind a desk larger than him, in an overstuffed leather chair that loomed over his head.

 

“You wished to see me, sir?” Luna greeted, curtsying before clasping her hands together. Even in ragged, dowdy dresses rough as tarp and spotted by soot and roughly combed hair that stuck like maize, her straight posture betrayed her noble upbringing. Perhaps it was all that was needed, as when Caligo looked upon her, it was drawn and poignant.

 

“No need to sit, I won’t keep you,” Caligo said dismissively, a flap of his wrist before a cutting gray gaze met through with her own. He stood, slowly, seeming to belay what roiled through his mind. “The Tsar of Salt has demanded an audience with you. Personally.”

 

Luna’s eyes widened and she felt her heart climb into her throat. “What on earth does His Radiance wish from me?”

 

Caligo snorted, an irregular puff of smoke curling away with the stutter. “You’re the Tsarevna of Light. The war with the Tsar of Death has become bad as of late, if the downpour of dead birds wasn’t enough to go by. With each death, His army grows stronger. They become conscripted, but you knew this, didn’t you?” His gaze sliced towards her own.

 

Hers dropped, sidelong and wondering. Emperor Iedolas’ frantic efforts to avoid death had come to a pass with the advent of the Magitek, an army wrought of the city and daemon vessels that used the Tsar of Death’s own darkness and demons against him. For the Tsar of Death was also known as the Deathless. Yet, it seemed a hopeless war, even as the Tsar of Salt ruled from his cities and possessively hoarded them like dragon’s gold. “And...if the Tsar of Death isn’t defeated, our country will become his?” Luna surmised before their gazes matched, searching his for confirmation.

 

“Precisely!” Caligo shouted, smiting his fist on his desk on a dash. “If be damned before I see my countrymen die with streaks of black on their chests, drinking dust from goblets and becoming hollow wraiths!” The man stalked around her, fuming hotly before he stopped short of leaving the study. “Get ready. Have Maria dress you in something of our daughter’s, but if you speak one word of how you were treated as anything less than a daughter of my own, you’ll regret it, _Lady_ Lunafreya.” The last was spoken in an odious snarl, the shorter man curling his lip in a grimace before whisking in hulking strides from the study.

 

Bemused but excited by this purpose, she decided she’d ponder what Iedolas wanted of her and the escape she might finally have from this wretched place, all while changing into the woman the empire thought Caligo had raised as his own.


End file.
